Adding iBOLT to New POWER7 IBM Power Systems Brings Integration to ERP Users

IBM’s announcement of new Power Systems featuring Power7 included this brief statement: “For IBM i clients, IBM is offering four new IBM i Solution Editions, integrated and optimized for rapid ERP deployment. These packages feature software from SAP, JD Edwards, Infor and Lawson and offer significant savings for customers running older versions of the i operating system who are looking to upgrade.”

These announcements provide a cost effective way for ERP customers to upgrade to the latest software versions as well. While we certainly recommend these Power Systems for consideration, we would hasten to add that the iBOLT Integration Suite should be added as part of the basic integration infrastructure for JD Edwards customers. The Power Systems announcements were mentioned at the recently concluded Quest Midwest Regional Users Group conference for customers using JD Edwards or PeopleSoft. The Quest Midwest conference seems to attract a higher concentration of JD Edwards customers in general and JD Edwards World customers in particular than other regional conferences.

This worked very well in my education session as I was asked to concentrate my remarks on JD Edwards World integration with third-party software applications. Developing JD Edwards Interfaces requires an awareness of the available integration patterns for the particular version and tools release to be integrated. Does the version used support business objects? Are z-processes available? What modules need to be interfaced? The nice thing about using a solution like iBOLT, is that there is real IBM i integration taking place.

Depending on the JD Edwards version used, integration needs to be integrated using a number of different patterns. If you go for the latest and greatest release of JD Edwards World, you can use the new Business Services capabilities. This is kind of a good news bad news situation. They work very well and conform to Web Services as a standard interface, however they only touch a fraction of the functionality of JD Edwards. For this reason, Z-processes are still needed for JD Edwards World A9.x.

With Enterprise One, the integration interface provided is business functions. Manually programming these functions is fraught with complexity, but they have a fairly broad reach across all JD Edwards EnterpriseOne functionality.
Many RPG programmers have written programs that deal with Z-processes. This is a slippery approach as Z-processes often produce very large exceptions files. If the data you are importing does not conform very closely to JD Edwards data formatting rules, then you have a big mess to clean up. Trying to manually program ways to deal with the data clean up in RPG becomes a true nightmare. As a result, many companies suffer through manual correction of data. This seems equally unacceptable to me.

I do not recommend the use of ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tools with JD Edwards for ongoing business processes. While these tools may work well for one-time data migration, there are too many risks and unknowns when working directly with the database. I guess the best thing to say is that one should use ETL or direct database programming only as a last resort.

Sometimes secure FTP is seen as a good way to engineer a transport layer that can be used to share data among applications. In reality, it is rather primitive when compared to technologies like XML, but in a pinch it can be the easiest way to get the job done.

The ability to receive email, parse it and bring it into ERP systems as well as the ability to format ERP data into a template email and distribute it are common requirements for ERP integration.

Quite often, information needed by an ERP system can be obtained from a Secure Web Services source. There is a need therefore for integration between ERP systems and Web Services. Ideally, one should be able to publish and subscribe Web Services without having to write any code.

iBOLT can format IBM i Attribute Strings and run CL Commands. Program calls or remote procedure calls (RPC) to COBOL, RPG, Java and .NET application logic are supported by iBOLT. One example of where this comes into play, is the calling of a Z-process, which is actually an RPG program.

iBOLT allows business process flows to orchestrate and interact with the IBM i User Space, Data Queue and even Spool Files. And of course, iBOLT works with all of the native file types on IBM i including IFS, DB2 400 , and SQL Database Access.
iBOLT can even work with all operating system partitions on an IBM Power System including Windows, IBM i, Linux and AIX.

The cost-savings announced by IBM with the IBM i solution editions for ERP users is excellent. Assuming that you want to integrate your ERP applications with third-party applications like customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), Human Resources Management (HRM), or a wide variety of other systems, then the iBOLT Integration Suite must be added to this configuration. iBOLT is the only analyst ranked integration-centric business process management suite that addresses the IBM i as something more than a hard disk or black box.

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